Flowery polymorphic perversion / Screwing up / Plant on meat

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them: Flowery polymorphic perversion — … Grażyna Gajewska at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland is one of the few academics who is now overtly studying polymorphic perversion on a broad, societal level. Her recent treatise “Polymorphic perversion […]

Frozen Meat and the Guerrilla War Against Misinformation

“Frozen Meat Against COVID-19 Misinformation: An Analysis of Steak-Umm and Positive Expectancy Violations” [by Ekaterina Bogomoletc and Nicole M. Lee, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, vol. 35, no. 1, 2021, pp. 118-125.] is a featured study in “Pandemic Dining: Gelato, Candy, Lettuce, Frozen Meat“, which is a featured article in the special Viruses and […]

“Frozen Meat Against COVID-19 Misinformation”

Scholars begin to try to make sense of the vexed year 2020, in this study: “Frozen Meat Against COVID-19 Misinformation: An Analysis of Steak-Umm and Positive Expectancy Violations,” Ekaterina Bogomoletc, Nicole M. Lee, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, epub 2020. (Thanks to Faye Flam for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at North […]

Meat-Weight Assessment of Washing-Machine-Washed EpiPens

(1) Loading some EpiPens (the little injection devices many people use to treat a bad allergic reaction) into washing machines, and then (2) washing them, and then (3) firing those washing-machine-washed EpiPens into hunks of meat was the basis for an experiment. Details are in the study: “The Effects of Washing on EpiPen Epinephrine Auto-injector […]

“Promise and Ontological Ambiguity in the In vitro Meat Imagescape”

Promise and ontological ambiguity in the in vitro meat imagescape is focus of a newly published study called “Promise and Ontological Ambiguity in the In vitro Meat Imagescape.” The study is: “Promise and Ontological Ambiguity in the In vitro Meat Imagescape: From Laboratory Myotubes to the Cultured Burger,” Neil Stephens and Martin Ruivenkamp, Science as Culture, […]

Much to chew on about many meats

Mark A Jobling [pictured here] of the University of Leicester writes about the genetic underpinnings of exotic meats. His essay, called “Flogging a dead horse“, appears in the journal Investigative Genetics [2013, 4:5]: People eat mules, as well as donkeys and horses, and in meat contamination testing, mule meat would appear to be horsemeat, because of the […]

“If it smells like meat…” a ‘Rule of Thumb’ for dogs

Although you might think (as many have) that dogs have a strong preference for eating meat, things may not be quite so clearcut. Authors Anandarup Bhadra and Anindita Bhadra of The Dog Lab (doggedly observing dogs at the Department of Biological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Kolkata, India), propose instead that dogs’ […]